It is called the theory of evolution, but “theory” does not mean conjecture, speculation or mere opinion. The term in its scientific sense means a well-supported body of interconnected statements that explains observations and can be used to make testable predictions. The theory of evolution has been confirmed over and over again.⁽¹⁾ No serious biologist takes it as anything but fully established. In the words of Theodosius Dobzhansky, author of a major work on evolution and genetics, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution…. Seen in the light of evolution, biology is … the most satisfying and inspiring science. Without that light it becomes a pile of sundry facts, some of them interesting or curious but making no meaningful picture as a whole.”⁽²⁾

It is unfortunate that religious fundamentalists, misusing the term “theory,” regard evolution as unproven. Some go so far as to say that all the evidence that leads us to believe in the immense age of the universe and the proliferation of species over time, as opposed to instanteous creation some 6000 years ago, were planted by the creator merely to give the appearance of great antiquity. Dobzhansky, a Christian, has this retort: “It is easy to see the fatal flaw in all such notions. They are blasphemies, accusing God of absurd deceitfulness. This is as revolting as it is uncalled for.”⁽³⁾

The religious believer may view evolution as God’s way of creating the world. The pantheist mystic may view evolution as the One Being’s way of unfolding and coming to know Itself over time. The secularist, the atheist or the merely agnostic may view evolution as the way living beings have propagated themselves, blindly and without foresight, in increasing diversity and complexity. Regardless of your opinion on the ultimate purpose of it all, it is important to understand how evolution works because the theory reflects reality, and basing your actions on reality works out much better than not. So the rest of this essay is a summary of the theory of evolution.

The term “evolution” in a general sense means a process of change or growth, often taken as a process of continual change from a simpler to a more complex state. In biology, the term refers to two things:

• The observed fact that the distribution of inherited traits in a population of organisms can change from generation to generation.

• The theory that the various types of animals and plants we find around us, including ourselves, originated in earlier types and that their differences are due to modifications in successive generations.

The basic concept of biological evolution as we understand it today is surprisingly simple. Charles Darwin, its originator, called it “descent with modification.” The concept is this:

• An organism’s offspring may vary slightly from the organism itself. Offspring may have slightly different traits from the parents or the same traits in different degrees.

• Organisms typically produce more offspring than can survive and reproduce, given the resources available such as food, shelter, sexual mates, etc. Hence, there is competition for such resources.

• In the competition for resources, some variations have an advantage over others. For example, one child’s beak may be slightly better at picking up small seeds than another’s, or one child may have slightly better eyesight than the other and hence be better able to find food and avoid predators.

• The individuals with advantageous variations have more offspring than those without.

• Since traits are heritable (are inherited from parent to child), this causes the population, over time, to contain more of the favorable variations and fewer of the unfavorable ones.

Darwin called this process “natural selection,” as opposed to artificial selection, the intentional breeding for certain traits that produces such differences in the same species as the Great Dane and the Chihuahua. The underlying mechanism is the same in both kinds of selection: certain individuals have more offspring than others, so their traits become more widespread in the population of that type of organism. A subset of natural selection called “sexual selection” is a result of competition for mates. In order to have offspring, an individual must not only survive but reproduce. Competition for mates, most often among males for females, selects for traits that enable males to dominate other males, such as horns and antlers, and for traits that attract females, such as plumage and other adornments.

This process happens slowly but inexorably. The variation between parent and offspring is most often minuscule, but over enough generations large changes result. A series of small, incremental changes can, given enough time, produce the extraordinary variety of speciation we find around us.⁽⁴⁾

This process is not purposive.⁽⁵⁾ No organism intends to produce a better beak or a better eye. It is merely a fact of life that those with favorable variations tend to have more offspring than those without, each of which in turn have the favorable variation. Among that generation’s offspring, those that further amplify the favorable variation have more offspring, and so on for generations. Conversely, unfavorable variations tend to die out over time. We should not take phrases such as “designed by natural selection” as implying a conscious, deliberate designer.

What is inherited is a trait, a feature of an organism such as eye color. Traits are passed from generation to generation as discrete units. Gregor Mendel conducted a famous study in which he mated pea plants, some of which had purple blossoms and some of which had white. The offspring did not have pale purple blossoms, but rather some had purple and some white, in distinct proportions.

What passes these discrete traits from generation to generation is the gene, the fundamental physical and functional unit of heredity. A gene is a segment of nucleic acid that, taken as a whole, specifies a trait. Genes are contained in chromosomes, which are composed of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), a polymeric molecule found in cells of the body. DNA governs the production, growth and reproduction of the cells of the body. The current understanding of biological evolution, developed since Darwin’s time, recognizes the gene as a fundamental, if not the fundamental, unit of natural selection.

Functionally, genes pass traits from generation to generation. They do this by replicating themselves from parent to child. Physiologically, the same chemical structure appears in the child as was found in the parent. In combination with other genes and triggered by environmental influences, the genes cause the parent’s traits to appear in the child. The term “trait” includes physical forms, such as bone density or eye color, behaviors such as sounding mating calls in certain seasons, and mental abilities or talents such as stereoscopic vision, empathy or language.

Genes are not the only replicators. Ideas, symbols, behaviors and other elements of culture replicate as well. Genes replicate from generation to generation; their cultural analogues, dubbed “memes,” replicate from mind to mind through writing, speech, gestures, rituals and the like.⁽⁶⁾ The principles of evolution apply the same: like a gene, a meme is a replicator, except memes replicate contemporaneously between minds rather than historically between bodies. Just as genes are subject to competition – the ones that replicate to the next generation are those that help their host bodies to survive and reproduce – so also are memes: only those that are catchy enough to secure attention in human minds replicate from mind to mind. What makes a meme catchy can be something as trivial as a memorable tune or limerick, or something that has continuing usefulness, such as ideas that hold cultures together.

So there is an abbreviated account of evolution. What does it mean for understanding human nature? To know what we are we must understand where we have come from. It is not just in our physical form that we have evolved, but in our mental capacities and in our cultures as well. Are we, then, merely products of our evolutionary heritage, unable to change? No, but in our attempts to change, it certainly helps to understand what we have to work with. Understanding that inherited traits are the result of natural selection can help put in context findings about how we humans actually function in the world, a topic to which I intend to turn in future essays.

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Notes
(1) See, for instance, the section titled “Predictive Power” in Wikipedia, “Evolution as fact and theory.”

(2) Dobzhansky, “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution.”

(3) Idem.

(4) There are three sources of variation: mutation, gene flow and genetic shuffling through sexual reproduction. Mutation happens when environmental influences cause tiny changes in the chemical structure of genes, altering their functioning, or when cells divide and imperfectly replicate their DNA. By far the majority of mutations are destructive, degrading the gene’s ability to do its job of directing the growth of organs and characteristics, but some enhance that ability, or change it so that the result is advantageous. Gene flow refers to the transfer of genes between populations of an organism. Individuals from one population mate with individuals of another and transfer genes between them. Genetic shuffling through sexual reproduction causes the combination of genes in each child to differ from that of its parents. In species that reproduce sexually, each individual has two copies of every gene (specifically, each has two strands of DNA, each of which contains chromosomes, which contain genes). In sexual reproduction, the child gets some genes from the mother and some from the father, and the combinations vary with each child.

(5) Religious or mystical thinkers may postulate a divine purpose that guides the process of evolution, but the science of biological evolution does not need that hypothesis to explain the process.

(6) Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, chapter 11, pp. 189-201.

References

Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene, New Edition. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Dobzhansky, Theodosius. “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution.” American Biology Teacher vol. 35 (March 1973) reprinted in Evolution versus Creationism, J. Peter Zetterberg ed., ORYX Press, Phoenix AZ 1983. Available online at http://www.2think.org/dobzhansky.shtml as of 14 May 2012.

Wikipedia. “Evolution.” On-line publication, URL = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution as of 2 February 2009.

Wikipedia. “Evolution as fact and theory.” On-line publication, URL = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_as_fact_and_theory as of 14 May 2012.

Wikipedia. “Meme.” On-line publication, URL = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme as of 16 May 2012.

According to this approach, an action is justified, regardless of its consequences, on the basis of a quality or characteristic of the act itself, its conformance to a rule. Morality is concerned with identifying and obeying moral rules. It is right – indeed, it is mandatory – to obey the rules and wrong to disobey them. Any particular act can be judged right or wrong according to whether and to what extent it conforms to the moral rules. A central concern, then, is to identify the rules so you can make sure you obey them.

The problem, of course, is how to determine what those moral rules are. I’ll return to that issue shortly.

It is undeniable that we have moral intuitions, that we have a sense of right and wrong. Lots of psychological research demonstrates it⁽²⁾ and we each know these intuitions first-hand: we feel self-righteous when we do something right, guilt when we do something wrong, and indignation when others transgress. There are good reasons to believe that these instincts are built into our brains and minds at birth, ready to be channeled by culture into particular forms. We evolved this way because humans have to live with other humans in order to survive, and moral rules regulate how we get along together. A shared sense of morals makes for group cohesion, and those who are members of cohesive groups survive and reproduce better than those who aren’t.

Moral norms have two functions according to Duke professor David Wong, interpersonal and intrapersonal: “The interpersonal function is to promote and regulate social cooperation. The intrapersonal function is to foster a degree of ordering among potentially conflicting motivational propensities, including self- and other-regarding motivations. This ordering serves to encourage people to become constructive participants in the cooperative life ….”⁽³⁾

In order to understand these functions, it is helpful to take a closer look at the various types of moral judgements and what they entail for our behavior. In this I am indebted to professor Margaret Little of Georgetown University, who has come up with what we might call a taxonomy of moral concepts. Here is an illustration:⁽⁴⁾

Moral and ethical judgements are all ways of saying “should”: telling someone what he or she should do (or refrain from doing) or should have done, or telling ourselves the same.⁽⁵⁾ Moral rules are in the branch labeled “deontic.” But the deontic is not the only type of “should”; another type is prudential. In deontic cases the “should” is a prescription or even a command. In the prudential case it is a recommendation. The force of our prescription or recommendation depends on the category in which the “should” is presented.

The first category is moral law (Deontic/Moral in the illustration). An example is “Thou Shalt Not Steal” (“should” being stated in its strongest form, “shall”). In this case we feel justified in demanding that someone obey the “should” and blaming them if they don’t. The imperative provokes in us feelings of moral righteousness and indignation. And the imperative has a sense of universality, that it applies to everyone. This is the domain of what I call the Rightness paradigm.

The second category is legal law (Deontic/Legal in the illustration), such as defining misdemeanor or felony theft. In this case we feel justified in demanding that someone obey and not only blaming but punishing them if they don’t. The imperative has force, however, only within the context of the laws of a given political community.

The third category is social convention (Deontic/Social). An example is the rule that if one attends a wedding, one should bring a gift. In this case we may not demand obedience (you can’t demand a gift) but we do feel justified in blaming failure, if not to the offender’s face then in gossiping to others. This is clearly a matter of social agreement, not universal law, and applies only within a given community.

The fourth category is prudential evaluation (Prudential/Commendatory), for example that for good health one should eat lots of vegetables. In this case we may not demand but may certainly advise adherence to such a “should.” And we may not blame or punish failure to comply but may say the choice is foolish. This kind of judgement is in the Goodness paradigm, one of the features of which is that such judgements are objectively verifiable. We can do studies of the effects of diet on health, studies that provide factual evidence, so the recommendation is not just someone’s opinion. The scope of applicability is interesting. Potentially such a judgement could be universal, but in practice it depends on context. Perhaps for a malnourished vegan eating lots of vegetables would not be good, and instead he or she should try some meat. I claim that there is nothing that is good in itself. When you are speaking about goodness, always ask “Good for whom? Good for what and under what circumstances?” if you want to avoid confusion.

This taxonomy gives us some insights into the nature of rights and duties, the objects of moral judgement. There is a quite a large body of literature on the ontological status of moral entities, meaning the manner of their existence. They seem to be real, in that many people recognize them, but they can’t be touched or felt or measured as physical objects can. Do they exist objectively, independent of our perception of them, as physical reality does? Are they merely social conventions? Are they somewhere in between?

There is good reason to believe that moral entities do not exist objectively, because it is a matter of empirical fact that people disagree about them in a way that they do not disagree about physical reality. A study asked respondents in the United States and in India whether it would be morally wrong to steal a train ticket in order to attend a best friend’s wedding. People in the US said it would be wrong to steal; people in India said it would be wrong not to steal, if that were the only way you could get to the wedding!⁽⁶⁾ This disagreement is clearly in a completely different category from, say, whether water always boils at the same temperature regardless of atmospheric pressure. You can observe and measure water boiling and come to a decisive answer, regardless of where you live. Cultural differences play no role at all in your answer about physical reality, but they do in your answer about moral reality.

This leads some to deny any reality to moral entities at all, and to label all moral judgements as false because they refer to fictional entities. This position, known as “moral error theory,” goes a bit too far, I think, as it ignores our indubitable intuitions of right and wrong. (Not that the content of such intuitions is indubitable, but that we do have them is not to be doubted at all.) We could say that moral entities are just social conventions, but that is not strong enough. We do not get together and decide what we shall regard as right and wrong as we do in deciding when to have tea every day. We really do seem to recognize something that exists independently of whether or not we agree that it exists.

My take on it is this: Moral entities are realities that are intersubjectively constituted within a community of practice, a social group, a culture or a society. By that I mean that within such a community or society, everybody agrees (more or less) on what they are, everybody treats them the same way and everybody acts as if they are real. So, for members of such a community they are real.

The term “constitute” comes from the phenomenological insight, verified by cognitive psychology, that in large part our minds concoct what we perceive. We don’t just see physical things; we make up what we see, based on sensory input that we do not make up. There is a large cognitive component in our experience, which we mostly overlook, but which sometimes becomes startlingly obvious.

Here is an example: A woman I know was walking across her ranch one day and stepped over a hose. Then she thought “That’s odd. What is a hose doing here?” She turned and looked and saw that it was a snake. (Fortunately, she was wearing boots.) Before she recognized that it was a snake, she had constituted it as a hose. Was it really a hose? No. Did she really see a hose the first time? Yes, she did.

Similarly, we really do intuit that some things are right and others wrong, that some deeds are obligatory and others forbidden, that some actions can be demanded of us and others cannot, that some behavior is blameworthy, some praiseworthy and some neither. And considering the effects of honoring those intuitions or not – namely, the reactions of others in the community – their objects really do have reality.

Does that mean we are stuck with the morals our society constitutes for us? Not at all. Now that we recognize the true nature of moral entities, we can choose what to do about them.

But how shall we choose? This actually presents a bit of a conundrum. Rationally, the sense of what is right and wrong, of what is our duty, loses its obligatory force. Constructed socially, moral entities are real but do not constrain our actions as physical reality does. When we recognize this state of affairs a sort of spell is broken, and we do not see our world the same way as before; we are no longer taken in by moral reality. We are able to choose, within the constraints of our emotional and social conditioning, which duties to obey, or even whether to obey any at all. And we have this freedom even if we would rather not have it. You can’t go back; you can’t undo a realization about how the world works. As the existentialists say, we are condemned to be free.⁽⁷⁾ Second-order mentation, our ability to consider in thought and imagination not just the world around us but ourselves as well, can seem like a burden because emotionally we still feel the force of these moral intuitions. We may know intellectually that it is not always wrong to steal a train ticket, but we still cringe at the thought of doing so. We seek a way to reconcile the antinomy of freedom and facticity.

Here is where the Goodness paradigm becomes useful. Since sensitivity to moral concerns is a part of our biological inheritance it is difficult to imagine that we could ever get rid of it even if we wanted to. And we might not want to; moral intuitions enable us to live with others without having to think what to do all the time. So it behooves us to choose wisely what duties and rules to live by. And the way to choose wisely is by considering the effects of our choices.

Consider the injunction against stealing. Even though there could be some short-term gain for the thief, it is in a person’s long-term interest to live in a society where people are honest. And being honest produces in us a greater internal harmony of feeling than being dishonest. There are benefits to playing by the rules. An honest person will be better off in the long run, even though in certain instances it might seem disadvantageous.

So if you are wise you will notice the moral urge to be honest, the call of conscience, and decide to accept it. Even though it is a triggered response, you will let that response happen. You will adopt a policy of accepting such responses, of refraining from taking what is not yours even if the opportunity arises, and you will enjoy a happier life as a result.

Recall the function of moral norms: to promote social cooperation and well-being. Moral rules that promote well-being are worth following; moral rules that don’t, aren’t.

And if you feel the need for an overarching duty, a sort of highest principle, let me suggest this: The best duty is the commitment to find ways to live that promote the well-being of yourself, your community and your environment. The highest and noblest endeavor, which we are free to regard as a duty if we wish, is to work for the good in all things.

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Notes

(1) See my paper on “The Good and the Right.” On-line publication, URL = http://www.bmeacham.com/whatswhat/GoodAndRight.html.

(2) See, for instance, the works of Jonathan Haidt, Steven Pinker and Marc Hauser, among others.

(3) Wong, “Making An Effort To Understand,” p. 13.

(4) Adapted from Little, Margaret, “The Moral Right to do Wrong.” Little’s examination shows the strength of analytic philosophy: by clarifying conceptually what we are talking about, we can avoid confusion and make progress toward insight.

(5) I do not distinguish between “moral” and “ethical,” although some philosophers do, reserving the former for the Rightness paradigm of rights and obligations, and the latter for any situation in which advice or command is appropriate.

(6) Wong, “Making An Effort To Understand,” p. 12.

(7) Sartre, “Existentialism Is a Humanism.”

References

Haidt, Jonathan, and Graham, Jesse. “Planet of the Durkheimians, Where Community, Authority, and Sacredness are Foundations of Morality.” On-line publication, URL = http://ssrn.com/abstract=980844 as of 12 April 2012.

Haidt, Jonathan. “On the moral roots of liberals and conservatives.” On-line, URL = http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind.html as of 12 April 2012.

Hauser, Marc D. Moral Minds: The Nature of Right and Wrong. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006.

Little, Margaret. “The Moral Right to do Wrong.” Lecture presented at the 2012 Royal Ethics Conference, University of Texas at Austin, 25 February 2012.

Pinker, Steven. “The Moral Instinct”. On-line publication, URL = http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/magazine/13Psychology-t.html as of 12 January 2008.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Existentialism Is a Humanism.” On-line publication, URL = http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm as of 17 September 2011.

Wikipedia. “Moral skepticism.” On-line publication, URL = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_skepticism as of 12 April 2012.

Wong, David. “Making An Effort To Understand.” Philosophy Now Magazine, Issue 82 (January/February 2011), pp. 10 – 13. London: Anya Publications, 2011. Also on-line publication, URL = http://www.philosophynow.org/issues/82/Making_An_Effort_To_Understand as of 12 April 2012.

by Bill Meacham
Happiness is the internal experience of functioning well, so to be happy we need to find out how to function well. To do that we need to know two things: what we are good at, and what is good for us. When we do what we are good at and get what is good for us, then we function well and experience happiness.

The Greeks called it eudaimonia, a word composed of eu, “well,” and daimon, a spirit. A daimon was a disembodied being somewhere between mortals and gods. Unlike the English “demon,” it was not necessarily malevolent; some spirits were beneficial and some, malicious. If one were accompanied by a eudaimon, a sort of guardian angel, then one’s life would go well; hence, the translation “happiness.” To be happy is to be accompanied by a good spirit.

Disembodied spirits aside, there is one spirit that always accompanies each of us, our own spirit, our own private experience of life. If we are healthy and functioning well, then we experience well-being.

Consider physical exercise. If your body is functioning well, if all the bones and muscles and sinews operate smoothly together and have sufficient strength and endurance, then it feels good to move. The pleasure of exercising a healthy body is not separate from the exercise, nor a result of the exercise. It is simply the exercise itself, as we experience it.

Similarly, the feeling of well-being that we experience when our life is going well is simply our own healthy functioning observed from the first-person point of view. Functioning well means doing what we are good at, and doing it in a good way, a way that promotes and enhances our ability to do it. When we function well, we experience happiness, fulfillment, eudaimonia.

There are things that some of us are good at and others are not. Some have special talents for sports, for instance, or mathematics or music; other have different talents. Each of us needs to find out what we are good at personally and pursue and develop our gifts.

There are also things that everybody is good at, by virtue of being human. That’s what philosophy is about: finding out what humans essentially are and how we can function in an excellent way. That effort is itself an exercise of an essential human capacity, the capacity for self-knowledge. So, to be happy, know thyself.

###

by Robert Tables
There is no shortage of answers to the question of how to be happy. The Stoics advise us to quit obsessing about stuff we can’t control. The Epicureans advise us to take pleasure in simple sensuality, friendship and freedom of thought. Aristotle recommends a life of intellectual contemplation; and Nietzsche, a life of challenge and mastery. Jesus says we should love God and love our neighbor. The Buddha says there is no God, so we should cultivate compassion, alleviate suffering, and observe keenly the actual conditions of life. Sartre says the point is not at all to be happy, but to be free, while Schopenhauer seems to think the whole enterprise is fruitless. Aquinas tells us to follow the natural law ordained by God; and Kant, the moral law dictated by pure reason. More recently – and with more plausibility, because based on actual research – the positive psychologists give us a number of tips: hang out with friends; give thanks; drop grudges; exercise regularly; be kind to others; pay attention to the present moment.

All good advice, no doubt, but it leaves me puzzled. How shall I judge among these and many other prescriptions for the happy life? I suppose I could try them all and see which ones work, but what if I find something that makes me reasonably content? Should I then quit looking and settle for what I’ve got, not knowing whether something even better lies around the corner? If I kept going maybe I would be really happy, exhilarated, even ecstatic. Or maybe I would fall into despair, stuck and unable to return to my former felicitous state. The uncertainty leaves me paralyzed with anxiety, incapable of proceeding and certainly not happy at all.

Which I eventually notice is stupid. So I abandon that line of thought and go back to my life. I take a walk, do my work, play with the kids, eat to satiation, take a nap, wake up, clean up the kids’ messes, snuggle with my sweetie, fall asleep and awaken to do it again.

And when it occurs to me to ponder the question once more I find that I am happy. Evidently, trying to be happy does not actually help. Perhaps the key is simply to do what is given to me to do, and leave the results to the benevolence that quietly, persistently, underlies and informs all things.

###

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(1) Philosophy Now magazine, “How Can I Be Happy?” Issue 88 Jan/Feb 2012, p. 36. London: Anya Publications, 2011. Also online publication, URL = http://www.philosophynow.org/issues/88/How_Can_I_Be_Happy as of 30 March 2012.

I have written about panpsychism a couple of times before (see “Dead or Alive?” and “Mental Causation”), and some readers have asked for a more rigorous defense of the theory than I have given in those articles. It is all very well to say that Panpsychism is a more coherent metaphysics than others, but what does that actually mean? OK, here goes. This is a bit more technical than usual, and longer, so please bear with me.

First, some context. This is all about the mind-body problem. Mental objects, such as thoughts and feelings, have no extension in space and are directly perceivable only by the person thinking or feeling them. Physical (bodily) objects have extension in space and are perceivable by more than one person. The question is, how are they related?

Here is the argument in its bare logical form as adapted from contemporary philosopher Galen Strawson:⁽¹⁾

Well that is terse, but it shows the logical structure of the argument. As in all logical arguments, the final conclusion is demonstrated to be true only if the logic is sound and all the premises are true. There is a surprisingly large body of recent work on this subject examining each of the premises in detail. I am certainly not going to reproduce it all, but I will go over the premises and give some reasons why I think each of them makes sense.

We start off by assuming monism, the view that everything is made of the same kind of stuff. Depending on whom you ask, that might be matter (wholly non-experiential), the view known as materialism; mind (wholly non-material), the view known as idealism; or something in between that takes on aspects of both matter and mind. The alternative is dualism, which says that matter and mind are two entirely distinct kinds of stuff. The problem with dualism, of course, is how to explain the interaction between the two. I take it that monism is not a controversial assumption.

The first premise says that everything has a material, or physical, aspect; so the argument starts off agreeing with the materialists. I am giving an operational definition of “material”: what is material is detectable or observable by more than one person. The first premise says that what is real is objectively there, and can be discerned by anyone with suitable training and instruments.

You would think that the second premise, that our own experience is indisputably real, would be equally uncontroversial, but that is not the case. Surprisingly, some people say that experience isn’t really real. Most notoriously, Daniel Dennett, a materialist, makes the following assertion, where “phenomenology” means the various items in conscious experience:⁽²⁾ “There seems to be phenomenology. That is a fact …. But it does not follow … that there really is phenomenology.”⁽³⁾

As Strawson points out, seeming itself is a type of experience, so the argument fails on the face of it.⁽⁴⁾ Dennett’s claim is not so absurd as it sounds, because Dennett is arguing that what is really real is the brain activity that creates our experience. He says, for instance, that our experience seems smooth and continuous, but the physiology behind it is discontinuous and full of gaps. Hence, our experience is not really continuous at all.⁽⁵⁾ But that just begs the question. In order to know anything about brain activity we have to see readings on dials, squiggles on paper, etc., and seeing is a kind of experience. The one thing we cannot doubt, when we are experiencing something, is that experience is going on. We can find out that we are mistaken about the objects of our experience, as when we see a hallucination or an optical illusion, but that we are experiencing is the bedrock of everything.

The conclusion from the first two premises is that experience is an undeniable aspect of whatever the universe is made of. And so is matter, of course. Now the question is, what is the relationship between experience and matter? A common claim is that experience emerges from non-experiential matter when matter reaches a certain degree of complexity. Premise 4 denies this claim.

The basic idea of emergence is that new properties arise in systems as a result of interactions at an elemental level.⁽⁶⁾ A case in point is liquidity. A single molecule of water is not liquid, nor are its constituent atoms. But when you put several molecules of water together, you have a liquid (at certain temperatures). Liquidity is an emergent property, specifically a form of “weak” emergence: the emergent quality is directly traceable to characteristics of the system’s components. Water molecules do not bind together in a tight lattice but slide past each other; that’s just part of their physical make-up.

Some say that consciousness is an emergent property as well, that it arises when constituent parts – neurons, sense organs and the like – are organized with sufficient complexity. If so, the emergence of consciousness would be a “strong” emergence. The new quality, consciousness, would not be reducible to the system’s constituent parts; the whole would be greater than the sum of its parts.

Strawson denies the possibility of such strong emergence. He says “there must be something about the nature of the emerged-from (and nothing else) in virtue of which the emerger emerges as it does and is what it is. You can get liquidity from non-liquid molecules as easily as you can get a cricket team from eleven things that are not cricket teams.”⁽⁷⁾ We can do so because in those cases “we move wholly within a completely conceptually homogeneous … set of notions.”⁽⁸⁾ But there is nothing about the nature of inert, non-experiential matter that would lead to the emergence of conscious experience. The two notions are not homogenous, but radically different. So consciousness does not emerge from non-conscious matter.

That, at least, is the argument in favor of premise 4. If you want to dispute it (and philosophers certainly have done so), you know where to take aim. But if we assume that it is true, then conclusion 5 follows: Experience is as fundamental to reality as matter; it is not something additional that emerges from what is primitive or more fundamental. In Strawson’s argument this is a stopping place; the rest is elaboration.

The next premise, 6, is that the ultimate constituents of reality are quite tiny: electrons, protons, quarks, muons and the like. This reflects the current findings of the physical sciences, and there is no reason to doubt it.

Hence (conclusion 7), at least some fundamental constituents of reality are intrinsically and irreducibly experiential in nature as well as material. For short, we call this idea “micropsychism.”

Micropsychism should make the idea of panpsychism a bit more palatable. The theory does not assert that inert substances such as rocks and concrete walls are conscious or have any kind of experience. It does assert that the ultimate components of such materials do have a kind of experience, some way of taking into account of their surroundings in a manner that, were it expanded and amplified quite a bit, would be like our waking consciousness of our world.

Premise 8 is an application of Occam’s Razor, which advises us to adopt the simplest theory that adequately explains all the facts. Conclusion 7 says we have reason to think that at least some elemental parts of reality are experiential as well as material. We have no positive reason not to think that they all are. So it makes the theory simpler and more elegant to apply it to everything. Hence we end up with full-blown panpsychism (conclusion 9): all fundamental constituents of reality are intrinsically and irreducibly experiential, as well as material, in nature.

There is no way to tell for sure, of course. We cannot perform a scientific experiment to demonstrate that tiny particles or waves or whatever they are have some kind of experience of their surroundings. Physics tells us, with mathematical precision, how they interact, but physics tells us nothing of their internality. It’s just that it makes a more coherent and refined theory to assume that every element, rather than only some of them, has some sort of experience. As I like to say, everything has an inside and an outside, the inside being the world as experienced by the entity itself and the outside being the way that the entity is experienced by other entities.

That’s the argument in a nutshell. The whole thing hinges on premise 4, the denial of strong emergence. Materialism requires strong emergence to account for human consciousness. Panpsychism requires emergence as well, but only of a weak sort. If the fundamental units of reality are experiential as well as material, then it makes sense in principle that elaborate combinations of them would result in the vivid consciousness that we all enjoy while awake. But what is the nature of that combination? Without an account of that, panpsychism has little more explanatory plausibility than materialism.

If everything has both an inside, as panpsychism suggests, and an outside, as both panpsychism and materialism agree, then the organization of the outside should have some bearing on the richness of the inside. Let’s go back to the initial conundrum, the difference between what is living and what is not. Is there something unique about how matter is organized in living beings that would account for the emergence of the complex and vivid form of experience that we know as waking consciousness? The answer is yes; it is what persists through time. The physical matter of non-living things persists through time, and their form changes through the impact of external forces. Living beings are the opposite: their physical matter is constantly changing through time, and only their form persists.

The physical matter of dead things just persists from moment to moment without changing, or changing only through external forces. In any given slice of time, the substance of a dead thing is the same as it is in any other slice of time. The totality of what it is can be encompassed in a single instant.

Living things are strikingly different. The physical matter that composes living things is constantly changing through metabolism, the process by which matter is ingested, transformed and excreted. What persists is not the matter itself but the form in which that matter is organized. A single slice of time does not encompass the unity of the living being at all. Only across time can we grasp its functional wholeness. I follow Hans Jonas here.⁽⁹⁾ The sense of being a whole conscious entity emerges with metabolism, the ability of a simple organism to maintain its structure through time by exchanging physical matter with its environment. The physical matter changes, but the organizational form doesn’t. (Or, it does, but it evolves so there is a continuity.) The structure of the material aspect – a changing material process that has a unity of form over time – gives rise to a unity of experience over time, a macroexperience, which is of a higher order than the microexperiences of the constituent elements.

Jonas’ insights map nicely to those of other panpsychists, the process philosophers. Charles Hartshorne has made the distinction between “compound” and “composite” individuals, which is roughly the distinction between what is living and what is not.⁽¹⁰⁾ A compound individual is one which (or who), on a macro level, has a “dominating unit,” an inclusive locus of experience, a single subject that unifies the experiences of its components into a coherent whole. Non-living things, although made up of actual ultimates that each have a mental or experiential aspect, have no such unification of experience. Hartshorne calls them “composite” rather than “compound.” David Ray Griffin calls them “aggregate.”⁽¹¹⁾ In compound (living) individuals the experiences of the components bind together and reinforce each other, giving birth to a higher-level experience, a dominant subjectivity among the micropsychic components, which is in some ways superior to and capable of directing them. In composite (dead) things, or aggregations, the experiences of all the component simple individuals remain separate, and no higher-level inclusive experience arises. It is the persistence of form in compound individuals that enables the merging of the mentality of the micropsychic units into an inclusive subjectivity that, in its most developed instantiation, includes all the richness of human mental life, including a sense of freedom and a knowledge of its own mortality.

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Notes

(1) Presented at a colloquium for the Department of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin on 20 October 2011. I am paraphrasing Strawson’s terminology. Strawson starts by agreeing with materialists that concrete reality is entirely physical in nature and then argues for a meaning of “physical” that includes both the material and the mental. I prefer to use the term “physical” as most people do, to mean material only.

(2) Dennett, Consciousness Explained, p. 45.

(3) Dennett, Ibid., p. 366.

(4) Strawson, “Realistic Monism,” p. 6, footnote 7.

(5) Dennett, Consciousness Explained, p. 356.

(6) Wikipedia, “Emergence.”

(7) Strawson, “Realistic Monism,” p. 15.

(8) Idem.

(9) Jonas, “Evolution and Freedom,” pp. 64-67. (Jonas, by the way, is fascinating. A student under Heidegger, he is rooted in both existential phenomenology and in biology, so his language is quite a bit different from Strawson’s. He is germane because he takes seriously the possibility that other beings besides the human have subjective experience, what he, along with many existentialists and phenomenologists, calls “interiority.” The germ of many aspects of human interiority is found in the simplest of living beings: a sense of freedom, of independence from the givenness of the material, along with a sense of necessity, of dependence on the material for one’s existence; a sense of Being, of life, in opposition to the ever-present possibility of Non-being, of death; a sense of value, of the attractiveness of what is nourishing and repulsiveness of what is dangerous; a sense of selfhood, of inner identity that transcends the collective identity of the always-changing components, and a sense of the world that is other than oneself. Delicious stuff, but too much to cover in any depth in this essay.)

(10) Hartshorne, “The Compound Individual,” pp. 215-217.

(11) Griffin, Whitehead’s Radically Different Postmodern Philosophy, pp. 58-61.

References

Dennett, Daniel C. Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1991.

Griffin, David Ray. Whitehead’s Radically Different Postmodern Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007.

Hartshorne, Charles. “The Compound Individual.” In Philosophical Essays for Alfred North Whitehead. New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1936.

Jonas, Hans. “Evolution and Freedom: On the Continuity among Life-Forms.” In Mortality and Morality: A Search of the Good after Auschwitz, ed. Vogel, Lawrence. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996.

Strawson, Galen. “Real Naturalism”. Draft paper delivered at the University of Texas at Austin, 20 October 2011.

Strawson, Galen. “Realistic Monism” in Consciousness and its Place in Nature, ed. Freeman, Anthony. Charlottesville VA: Imprint Academic, 2006.

Wikipedia. “Emergence.” On-line publication, URL = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence as of 1 February 2012.

Wikipedia. “Occam’s Razor.” On-line publication, URL = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam’s_razor as of 4 February 2012.

Plato (through the character of Socrates) in the Republic likens the Good to the sun. As the sun provides light so that we can see, the Good provides the medium whereby we have knowledge. The Good is not knowledge and is not truth but is something higher than both. The good is a Form, indeed the highest Form. It is something of “inconceivable beauty” that “transcends essence in dignity and power.”⁽¹⁾

The Forms, according to Plato, are something immaterial but nevertheless most fundamentally real. They can be apprehended only by pure intellect. They are unchanging and give reality to all the changing things with which we are acquainted. (The Greek word is eidos, from which we get our word “eidetic.” Someone with eidetic memory remembers precisely the physical form of what they have seen or heard.)

The concept of unchanging form underlying changing reality makes some sense in mathematics. We have all seen groups of, say, four things, but we have never seen the number four or fourness itself. We have all seen triangles, but they are imperfect; if you look closely, you can see flaws in the lines. Nevertheless, we know the mathematical concept of triangularity, with its absolutely straight lines and perfect angles, and we can use that concept in geometrical proofs. Plato says that the Good is something like that. You don’t find the Good itself in the world of the senses, only good things, which are reflections, as it were, of the Form of the Good. You need an almost mystical vision to see the Good.

Much more recently the analytical philosopher G. E. Moore, in his Principia Ethica, asserts that “good” is a primary and indefinable term. When we say something is good, we mean, according to Moore, that “it ought to exist for its own sake,” that it “has intrinsic value.”⁽²⁾ It does not consist in a relationship between things. The Good is simple and has no parts, and is thus a kind of ultimate concept: “‘good’ denotes a simple and indefinable quality.”⁽³⁾ It is “not to be considered a natural object”.⁽⁴⁾ If so, then how do we know what it is? Moore’s answer is that we have a kind of moral intuition such that our knowledge of the good is “self-evident.”⁽⁵⁾

Both Plato and Moore assert forms of ethical intuitionism, the idea that we know ethical concepts via some sort of non-sensory insight. The problem with such theories is that they are unverifiable; there is no way to adjudicate competing insights. Here is Alasdair MacIntyre on the subject, speaking of the group of intellectuals surrounding Moore:

[The question was] ‘If A was in love with B under a misapprehension of B’s qualities, was this better or worse than A’s not being in love at all?’ How were such questions to be answered? By following Moore’s prescriptions in precise fashion. Do you or do you not discern the presence or absence of the non-natural property of good in greater or lesser degree? And what if two observers disagree? Then … either the two were focusing on different subject matters, without recognizing this, or one had perceptions superior to the other. But … what was really happening was quite other [according to John Maynard Keynes, who was there]: ‘In practice, victory was with those who could speak with the greatest appearance of clear, undoubting conviction and who could best use the accents of infallibility’ and Keynes goes on to describe the effectiveness of Moore’s gasps of incredulity and head-shaking, of Strachey’s grim silences and of Lowes Dickinson’s shrugs.⁽⁶⁾

In other words, there is no rational way to tell what is good by appealing to intuition. So we will have to appeal to something else: careful observation of objective reality.

Far from being transcendent or perceivable only by some kind of special intuition, the good is a feature of the natural world; it has to do with benefits, which are publicly observable. Something that benefits something or someone else we call good for that thing or person. Such goodness may be instrumental or biological. Instrumentally, a hammer is good for pounding nails, and what is good for the hammer is what enables it to do so well. Biologically, air, water, and food are good for living beings.

To make sense, an instrumental usage requires reference to somebody’s purpose or intention. Thus, a hammer is good for pounding nails, and you pound nails in order to build things such as furniture or housing. Your intention is to acquire the comfort and utility these things afford you. That is your goal, or end, and the good is what helps bring it about.

The biological usage does not require reference to purpose or intention. It is expressed in terms of health and well-being. That which nourishes a living thing is good for it. The good, in this sense, is that which enables a thing to function well.

The instrumental usage intersects the biological when we consider what is good for something that is itself good for a purpose or intention. For instance, keeping a hammer clean and sheltered from the elements is good for the hammer and enables the hammer to fulfil its instrumental function. In the instrumental sense as well, the good is that which enables a thing to function well.

Just as good is defined in relation to an end (the proper functioning of a tool, the health of an organism), the value of the end is defined in relation to another end. For instance, a hammer is good for driving nails. Driving nails is good for building houses. We build houses to have shelter and warmth. And we desire shelter and warmth because they sustain our life. This chain of goods and ends stretches in both directions from wherever we arbitrarily start looking. A hammer is good for driving nails. So what is good for the hammer? Whatever enables it to perform its function. It’s not good to leave it out in the rain; it is good to handle it carefully, swing it accurately with grace and force, and put it away safely.

Both the instrumental and the biological usage give meaning to the term “good” by referring to the consequences or effects of an action or event. That fresh vegetables are good for humans means that the effect of eating them is healthful. That a hammer is good for pounding nails means that using it for that purpose is likely to have the effect you want, namely that the nails go in easily and straight. Some synonyms for “good” are “helpful,” “nourishing,” “beneficial,” “useful” and “effective.” Some synonyms for “bad” are their opposites: “unhelpful,” “unhealthy,” “damaging,” “useless” and “ineffective.”

There are degrees of goodness and its opposite, badness. That some plants need full sunlight to thrive and others need shade means that full sunlight is good for the former and not so good for the latter.

There is no end to the chains of goods and ends, no summum bonum (highest good) in which all chains culminate or from which all goods are derived. The world is a web, not a hierarchy. The only ultimate good would be the good of the entire universe and all that is within it, not an abstract entity or concept apart from it.

And all this is publicly observable. Last summer Texas experienced extreme drought and days on end of blisteringly hot weather. Lots of plants were withered and dried out. But not the Texas Mountain Laurels. They were big, full-bodied and blooming in profusion. Anybody could see that the hot, dry weather was good for them, although not good for many other plants. But if you were to plant Texas Mountain Laurel in some other bioregion, say the East Coast or the Pacific Northwest, they would do poorly there. And anybody could see that as well.

So is hot, dry weather good? In the abstract, apart from context, the question makes no sense. It is good for Texas Mountain Laurels and not good for many other plants.

Is it good to be honest? Again, we cannot answer out of context. If you are compassionately hiding a Jewish family from the Nazis, then it is not good to be honest, for you or for your hidden guests. If you are a merchant and you want repeat business, or if you just want self-respect and friends, then it is good to be honest.

There is nothing that is good in itself. When you are asking about goodness, you must always ask “Good for whom? Good for what and under what circumstances?” If not, you risk mystification.

Confusion about this topic is rampant. The great philosopher Hans Jonas seeks “knowledge of the Good, of what man ought to be.”⁽⁷⁾ What man (meaning human beings generally) ought to be is not at all the same as what nourishes or benefits us. Jonas is importing concepts of duty and obligation from the Rightness paradigm, a whole different way of speaking about ethics, but using the term “good” to do so.⁽⁸⁾ He speaks of “what the human Good is, what human beings should be, what we are all about, and what is advantageous for us.”⁽⁹⁾ Of these three things the first, “what human beings should be,” has nothing to do with goodness as I am defining it; the last, “what is advantageous for us,” has everything to do with it; and the second, “what we are all about,” is a factual inquiry, the results of which would have great bearing on what is advantageous for us.

A reader complains that I am “naturalizing the Good.” Of course I am. That’s where the Good resides, in the natural world, in the web of relations among things and people. It does not lie in some transcendent realm, accessible only to an unverifiable faculty of intuition. Many of those who believe it does have an unfortunate habit of trying to impose their view of morality on the rest of us. It would be better for all concerned if we got over this philosophical muddle and started paying attention to the real world.

——–

Notes

(1) Plato, Republic, 509a – 509b, in Hamilton and Cairns, p. 744.

(2) Moore, Principia Ethica, Preface, ¶2.

(3) Moore, Principia Ethica, §10, ¶1.

(4) Moore, Principia Ethica, §12, ¶1.

(5) Moore, Principia Ethica, Preface, ¶3.

(6) MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 17.

(7) Jonas, “Toward an Ontological Grounding of an Ethics for the Future.” p. 104. Emphasis in original.

(8) See my “The Good and the Right” for a discussion of the Rightness paradigm.

(9) Jonas, “Toward an Ontological Grounding of an Ethics for the Future.” p. 104. Emphasis in original.

References

Jonas, Hans. “Toward an Ontological Grounding of an Ethics for the Future.” In Mortality and Morality: A Search of the Good after Auschwitz, ed. Vogel, Lawrence. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996.

MacIntye, Alasdair. After Virtue, Third Edition. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007.

Meacham, Bill. “The Good and the Right.” On-line publication, URL = http://www.bmeacham.com/whatswhat/GoodAndRight.html.

Moore, G. E. Principia Ethica. Online publication, URL = http://fair-use.org/g-e-moore/principia-ethica as of 7 February 2012.

Plato, Collected Dialogues. Ed. Hamilton, Edith and Cairns, Huntington. New York: Pantheon Books, Bollingen Foundation, 1963.

Rodriguez, David. “Texas Mountain Laurel.” Online publication, URL = http://bexar-tx.tamu.edu/HomeHort/F1Column/2007%20Articles/Plant%20of%20the%20Week/MAR17TexasMountainLaurel.htm as of 7 February 2012.

Wikipedia, “Form of the Good.” Online publication, URL = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_of_the_good as of 7 February 2012.

Wikipedia, “G. E. Moore.” Online publication, URL = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._E._Moore as of 7 February 2012.

Wikipedia, “Theory of Forms.” Online publication, URL = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Forms as of 7 February 2012.

The U.S. Health Care Reform legislation mandates that employer-funded insurance plans cover birth control for employees, including students at Catholic colleges, according to a recent ruling from the Obama administration. Catholic institutions are howling in protest, claiming that to do so would force them to violate their religious beliefs.

The ruling is based on recommendations of the Institute of Medicine, an independent group of doctors and researchers that concluded that birth control is not just a convenience but is medically necessary to ensure women’s health and well-being. Providing birth control would likely lower both pregnancy and abortion rates. And women with unintended pregnancies are more likely to be depressed and to smoke, drink and delay or skip prenatal care, potentially harming fetuses and putting babies at increased risk of being born prematurely and having low birth weight.⁽²⁾

In other words, providing birth control provides unmistakable benefits to women and avoids harm to infants. This way of thinking is the hallmark of the Goodness paradigm, evaluating choices on the basis of the benefits and harms expected from the various alternatives. If you allow birth control, you increase the chances for women’s health and reduce the chances for the depressing consequences of unintended pregnancy. If you forbid it, you do the opposite. In the former case, more good ensues; in the latter, more harm.

Opposed to this is the Rightness paradigm, evaluating choices on the basis of moral rules regardless of consequences. The Catholic Church considers it morally wrong to prevent conception by any artificial means, including condoms, IUDs, birth control pills and sterilization. So Catholic college administrators don’t want to prescribe birth control pills even though according to Catholic doctrine itself abortion is a graver sin than contraception, and banning contraceptives would most likely increase abortions.

So how should we adjudicate this? I am thoroughly in the Goodness camp here. There is no systematic way to find out what the moral rules are. In the case of the Catholic church, all it can do is appeal to authority. But there is a systematic way to find out what the benefits and harms are: observe reality carefully. So I find the Goodness paradigm far more preferable. for this and several other reasons outlined in my paper on the subject, “The Good and the Right.”⁽³⁾

The Catholic Church is being obstructionist. The law already exempts churches and other religious institutions from having to provide contraceptive coverage for their employees.⁽⁴⁾ The issue here is Catholic schools. You can make the case that if someone joins the church they are agreeing that the church’s moral rules apply to them. But you can’t make the same case for someone who merely attends a church college.

A lot of philosophical controversy is rightly regarded as abstruse, theoretical and of little practical import. But not this one. Where you come down on the Goodness vs. Rightness question has profound consequences not only for your own actions but for societal policies that impact millions of people.

—-

(1) Grady, Denise, “Ruling on Contraception Draws Battle Lines at Catholic Colleges.” New York Times, 29 January 2012. On-line publication, URL = http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/30/health/policy/law-fuels-contraception-controversy-on-catholic-campuses.html.

(2) “Excerpts From a Report on Women’s Health.” New York Times, 29 January 2012. On-line publication, URL = http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/30/health/policy/excerpts-from-a-report-on-womens-health.html.

(3) Meacham, Bill. “The Good and the Right.” On-line publication, URL = http://www.bmeacham.com/whatswhat/GoodAndRight.html.

(4) “A New Battle Over Contraception.” New York Times, 5 November 2011. On-line publication, URL = http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/opinion/sunday/a-new-battle-over-contraception.html as of 29 January 2012.

It is easy to contrast science and religion as two fundamentally different and incompatible ways of acquiring beliefs about the world. Science is based on empirical evidence. Religion, many say, is based on faith, which is belief without evidence. And empirical evidence is better than faith, so science is better than religion. In its extreme form, this account says that science is the only reliable way to knowledge, and religion is total bunk. End of story, and a fat fickle finger of fate to those deluded souls who still believe in the latter.

That, however, is rather an oversimplification. In fact there are elements of faith in science and elements of empirical inquiry in religion, or at least religion at its best. (One of the problems in the science-vs-religion controversy is that there are many forms of religion and some of them are undoubtedly full of ignorance and superstition. But some aren’t. So I’ll talk about religion at its worst and religion at its best, recognizing that most religions fall somewhere in between.)

There are a couple of ways to acquire knowledge about the world. The most fundamental, which we all do from infancy onward, is to notice regularities in our experience of the world, devise strategies for dealing with them, and hone and revise our strategies as we get more experience. Babies and small children are mighty learners, with huge curiosity and love of finding out new things and mastering new skills. If we are lucky, we retain that inquisitiveness throughout life. If not, if we succumb to the distresses of the adults around us and the rigidity of the schools we are forced to attend, we gradually lose our zest for learning.

This is not to say that paying attention to what adults tell us is bad. In fact, it is not only a necessary component of learning, but the other primary way we find out things. We listen to what others tell us about what they have learned from their experience of the world, and thereby avoid having to go through a lot of those experiences ourselves. Without culture, without shared learning, we would hardly be human.

And then we test what others have told us against our own experience, which is why paying attention to our experience is primary and listening to others is secondary, although certainly a very close second.

So here is the fundamental difference between science and religion at its worst: Science is a systematic way of checking what people say about reality. Religion at its worst is systematically believing others without checking. And the claim of the pro-science folks, of which I am one, is that the former is a far more reliable way of acquiring true beliefs than the latter.

The word “science” can mean two things: a method for acquiring knowledge and the sum of the knowledge thus acquired. I am talking about the first meaning, the scientific method, which consists of five steps:⁽¹⁾

1. Observe and describe some phenomenon or group of phenomena of interest.
2. Formulate a hypothesis to explain the phenomena.
3. Make predictions based on that hypothesis. You can predict observation of other phenomena or the quantitative results of experiments to be performed.
4. Perform experimental tests of the predictions. Ideally, get several independent experimenters to perform the experiments. Document both the procedure and the results so others can replicate them.
5. Come to some conclusion about the hypothesis. If the experiments come out as predicted, they confirm (but do not fully prove) the hypothesis. If the experiments fail to come out as predicted, they disprove the hypothesis.

You don’t have to be a scientist in a laboratory to do this. The scientific method is just a formalized approach to everyday problem solving. For instance:

1. Phenomenon of interest: the car won’t start.
2. Hypothesis: It is out of gas.
3. Prediction: If I put gas in it, it will start.
4. Experiment: Put gas in it and try to start it.
5. Conclusion: If it starts, the hypothesis was correct and the problem is solved. if not, the hypothesis was wrong, and I need to try something else.

Carefully elaborate that procedure, put in stringent safeguards to isolate the variables so you are sure that you are measuring just what you want, and you have the scientific method. The strength of this approach is that it minimizes the influence of bias or prejudice. By getting others to replicate the experiments and document their results the process weeds out mistaken observations, overly-hasty conclusions, biased interpretations and the like. The result is a model or representation of the world that is reliable, consistent and non-arbitrary. In other words, it results in our best attempt at knowledge of the world, always recognizing that future findings might alter the model.

In the scientific method, what we take to be true is always provisional, subject to change based on further observation. Of course, some aspects of our knowledge have been confirmed so much that it would take quite a lot to dislodge them. But the point is that science does not give us theoretical certainty, only the practical certainty that comes from basing our actions on what we have found out and having our actions be successful in the world. And that practical certainty has given us defense against disease, a secure supply of food, roads, bridges, electricity, indoor plumbing, the Internet and all the other technological marvels that we enjoy today.

It is all based on public verifiability, on repeatable observation of facts that any competent observer can see. But what happens when the phenomena to be investigated are private, not public? What happens, to take an extreme case, when you see a burning bush and hear a voice that nobody else hears, and that voice tells you to do something well outside your comfort zone? I have addressed this question before. Given a single numinous experience of this kind, there is no way to tell whether it is truthful or delusional. But given more than one of them, or given reports of others about similar experiences, or – most importantly – given your response to such an experience and the results of that response, you have some basis for belief.

In other words, religion at its best bears some resemblance to science. The phenomena it concerns are not public in the same way that the subject matter of the physical sciences is. But they are subject to verification. There exist, for instance, quite detailed sets of instructions for meditative practices that produce altered experiential states. They are reliable, having been replicated many times over the centuries, and if you do the practices you too will experience those states. The instructions carry with them conceptual frameworks for interpreting and understanding what you experience, including recommendations for how to conduct your life. If you live your life as recommended, you will experience the benefits, which typically include more peace, harmony and happiness than before.

You can think of spiritual practice as a sort of experiment. You have to do the experiment to get the results, just as you do in the physical sciences. Unlike the physical sciences, the results are largely private, not public; but they are not unverifiable. You can talk to others about them. And some of the results  – increased compassion and generosity, decreased anger and harshness toward others, for instance – are indeed observable by others. The best religious teachers encourage a scientific attitude: “Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense,” says the Buddha.⁽²⁾

That’s religion at its best. What about science at its worst? Just as many in the pro-science camp find fault with religion, many religionists find fault with science. Science, they fear, leaves out all the important things in life: meaning, value, personal freedom and responsibility, connection with a transcendent reality. They think science denigrates profound sources of truth, sources on which they have staked their lives. Hence the question that prompted this essay. They think science is just another form of religion, antithetical to their own.

Science itself is not religion, it’s a method of investigation, but some people do make a religion out of it. We can call that religion “scientism” rather than science. Scientism asserts that public knowledge is the only real knowledge; that physical matter is all that exists; that consciousness is at best an epiphenomenon, along for the ride so to speak, but without causal efficacy; that belief in God, spirits or anything that goes beyond the physical is sheer delusion. People who espouse scientism (perhaps we could call them “scientismists” to distinguish them from true scientists) take as the ultimate and only truth a narrow view of the scientific method and a subset of the findings of science. In this they are indeed religious; they espouse their view of the world with the same dogmatism and fervor as the worst of the religionists.

What those who make a religion out of science don’t seem to understand is that the scientific method itself is based on some assumptions that are not, strictly speaking, demonstrated by the method: that there is an objective reality; that it is ordered in a rational and intelligible way; that it is describable by immutable mathematical laws, laws that are not going to change arbitrarily with the passage of time or in different regions of space; and that these laws are discoverable by systematic observation and experimentation. And science – meaning both the scientific method and the results of that method so far – fails to explain why these things are so. Science cannot tell us where the mathematical laws come from, nor why they apply as they do. Science is based on faith in an orderly universe. So far that faith has panned out, and we have no reason to disbelieve it; but faith it is, nevertheless.

Uncritical faith in anything is unworthy of a true human being, whether that be revealed religion or the findings of science. Religious believers would do well to understand and appreciate what science is really about: “The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you don’t actually know.”⁽³⁾ And those who make a religion out of science would do well to have some humility and realize that they are not so different from those to whom they think they are superior.

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Notes

(1) Wolfs, Frank L. H, “Appendix E: Introduction to the Scientific Method.” On-line publication, URL = http://teacher.pas.rochester.edu/phy_labs/appendixe/appendixe.html as of 22 November 2011. See also Science Made Simple, Inc., “Understanding and using
The Scientific Method.” On-line publication, URL = http://www.sciencemadesimple.com/scientific_method.html as of 22 November 2011.

(2) Buddhist-Tourism.Com, “Buddha Quotes.” On-line publication, URL = http://www.buddhist-tourism.com/buddhism/buddha-quotes.html as of 7 January 2012.

(3) Pirsig, Robert M., _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_ as quoted in Railsback, Bruce, “Some Definitions of Science.” On-line publication, URL = http://www.gly.uga.edu/railsback/1122sciencedefns.html as of 22 November 2011.

References

Davies, Paul. “Taking Science on Faith.” On-line publication, URL = http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/24/opinion/24davies.html as of 7 January 2012.

Overby, Dennis. “Laws of Nature, Source Unknown.” On-line publication, URL = http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/18/science/18law.html as of 7 January 2012.

Wikipedia. “Science.” On-line publication, URL = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science as of 22 November 2011.

Alice returned an item that she bought on sale and was given credit for the full price. She then told the clerk to give her credit only for the sale price.

Bob ordered some items on line and got a discount because he bought three for the price of two. Then he called back and canceled two of them, but the customer service rep left the discount on the order. Bob thought about it and called back and had them remove the discount.

Admirable honesty, right? But why is it admirable? And why did Alice and Bob return the money? In both cases the sales clerk or service rep thought it was unusual (you could tell by their look or their tone of voice). Perhaps they thought it was stupid, too. Certainly a lot of people would; why not just take the extra money?

Alice returned the money because she did not want to get the clerk in trouble, and it would not be fair to keep the money. She did not think about whether she should do it or how she would feel later. She just did it, because it was right.

Bob returned the money because he knew he would feel bad if he kept it. The knowledge that he had caused harm to someone else would prey on his mind. He would feel ashamed of himself, unworthy, afraid of being punished in some karmic way, or at least of missing out on some karmic benefit. He, too, did not fully work all this out at the time; he just realized he would feel bad.

These actions are admirable by the standards of conventional morality, which says we should all be honest and avoid cheating. But as philosophers we want to examine conventional morality, not just blindly adhere to it. Why should we be honest and avoid cheating?

It is easy enough to make plausible speculations about the origins of morality. Humans evolved a moral sense because it promotes group harmony and cooperation, and humans in groups survive a lot better than humans alone. To be more precise, those humans who exchanged favors cooperatively had more offspring than those who didn’t. Those humans who could sense who was trustworthy and who was not, who was taking more than their share or taking without returning equally, had more offspring than those who didn’t. Consequently, by this time we have developed quite a keen moral sense. Different cultures may channel that moral sense in different ways – in some cultures a person who cuts in line is very much disapproved of, and in other cultures it is just expected that everyone will crowd toward the front – but the underlying tendency to have intuitions about fairness and the desirability of doing good to others are inbred. So it is not surprising that we find Alice and Bob admirable.

That is not a philosophical justification of morality however. It’s only a story about how we came to have the morality we find ourselves with.

To recap briefly what I have written about elsewhere, there are two ways of speaking, and hence thinking, about ethics. The first is the language of right and wrong; the second, the language of goodness and harm. For many reasons I think the language of goodness and harm makes more sense. What is right has to do with conformance to rules or regulations; but philosophers have profound differences of opinion about what the rules are and, more importantly, no agreement about how to find out what they are. What is good, by contrast, has to do with observable benefits. It is easy – or if not easy at least in principle possible – to determine what is beneficial and harmful in any given situation, including to whom and how much. On that basis you can make sound ethical judgements.

In the Rightness paradigm it is easy to see why giving back the money is admirable. It is ethically wrong to take something you are not entitled to, so giving it back is the right thing to do. And it is always admirable to do the right thing.

In the Goodness paradigm it is also easy to see why the choice to give the money back is admirable: it benefits both the merchant and the customer (Alice or Bob), and possibly the sales clerk as well. It is obvious how it benefits the merchant and the sales clerk; the merchant gets more money, and the sales clerk stays out of trouble. It is less obvious how it benefits Alice or Bob. They get less money, which is why people are surprised when they act honestly. But just looking at the money is short-sighted. Looking at how they feel afterwards, proud and not guilty, worthy and not shameful, involves taking a longer and deeper view of what is beneficial. And those feelings of worth or shame last longer and have more prolonged effects than just having more money (particularly the relatively small amounts involved in these examples).

(I am not, by the way, claiming that the choice that Alice and Bob made is morally superior in some absolute sense or even that it was morally superior at the time. Somebody who needed the money more than they did might make a different choice. And that might be OK, because we’ve got to survive physically before we can take care of anything else, including our ongoing psychological state or the welfare of others. I am only claiming that paying attention to our choices and how we make them is a good thing.)

And there is an even deeper effect to consider, beyond the money and beyond the feelings of pride or guilt: the kind of person we become as a result of such choices.

It would be entirely too unwieldy to have to think through all our choices. It is much easier to rely on habit, and in fact we do so most of the time. The effect of the ethically admirable choice is to make it easier to make a similar choice in the future. And we want to make similar choices because they lead to a greater sense of satisfaction and well-being. As Aristotle pointed out, what we are looking for are dispositions to act in a certain way, character traits that reliably lead to happiness or fulfillment.

Most of us can figure out what the right or best thing to do is, but are tempted to do something else, such as taking the money, that may have short-term benefits but long-term disadvantages. Aristotle, ever the classifier, lists three deficient modes of ethical behavior. The worst is the evil person, who pays no attention to what is right or good and acts only to satisfy his or her own immediate desires. Slightly better is the person who lacks mastery, who knows what is right or good but is unable to overcome temptation. Even better is the one who is a master of himself or herself, who knows what is right or good and feels temptation, but overcomes it. Best of all is the one who is not deficient at all, who feels no temptation to do what is not right or good.

I venture to guess that most of us do not fall in the last category; we all feel temptation to aggrandize ourselves at the expense of others at times. The point of the philosophical inquiry is to give ourselves ammunition to overcome the temptation. Having a clear understanding of our ethics ahead of time, before the moral quandary arises, helps us make the better choice when it does.

What we want is a character that is capable of being guided by benevolence. Such benevolence might be good habits or divine inspiration or something in between, but the point is to clear out the mental rubbish, the noise, the internal pressures that tend to lead us astray. Every time we make an ethically good choice we reduce the strength of the temptation to do otherwise.

So the choice to give back the money benefits more than just the parties to the transaction, the merchant, the clerk and us, the customer. It also benefits the selves we will become. And it benefits all those with whom our future selves will come into contact. And all those people will, in turn, benefit us, who may remember then successfully resolving a quandary today.

It seems like a no-brainer. Who would not want to join in such an upward spiral of benevolence? Start now. There is no better time.

———-
References

Kraut, Richard, “Aristotle’s Ethics” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. On-line publication, URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-ethics/ as of 29 December 2011.

That is partly because the kind of explanation we are looking for is inappropriate. Typically we want to know what specific physical events – which neurons, which parts of the brain – are the causal entities behind the decision to raise the arm. If we knew that, we think, we would have a physical chain of events leading from start to finish, and thus would have an adequate explanation. But we wouldn’t, and not just because the decision is something other than brain events. Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t; but even if it is, we still would not have an adequate explanation because we would want to know what caused the decision. And what caused the cause of the decision, and what caused the cause of the cause of the decision, and so forth. And that is a fruitless task when applied to human beings, because what makes human beings do things is not in the same category of explanation as what makes physical stuff do things.

Consider what explanation is all about. It has two aims, two objectives. The first is to predict and control. We want to predict what the object of our interest is going to do, how it is going to behave, so that we can either make it do what we want or, if we can’t do that, at least be prepared to respond to it. That’s what science and technology are all about. The physical sciences tell us how things behave, and technology gives us tools for dealing with them. What this kind of explanation gives us is laws, regularities, insights into the mechanisms of nature. With that knowledge we can pull the levers, so to speak, and make things happen.

The second aim of explanation is to tell a plausible story about how the object of our interest got here, how it came to be what it is. There is something satisfying about putting a phenomenon in the context of its developmental history. We feel that we know it. Story-telling is common to human beings; we all love a good story precisely because it puts things in context and enables us to understand them and deal with them. Typically the stories involve people or animals and plants that act like people — in short, agents. We don’t have to actually undergo all the adventures, trials and tribulations that befall the characters in the story. Instead we learn how those characters handled their situations and thereby learn how we could handle ourselves in similar situations. That is a lot faster than starting from scratch and learning from our own mistakes every time. Stories are at the root of human culture, which advances far more rapidly than biological evolution.

And it’s even better when the story helps us predict and control. Stories about people do that in the cultural and interpersonal realm. We learn what motivates them and how to get along with them and influence them. Stories about physical history do it in the physical realm. The story of how the land we live in came to be formed gives us insight into its geology and its biology. With that knowledge we know what kinds of things grow there and what is likely to lie underground, and we find ways to provide for our physical sustenance. The story of evolution tells us how living things, including ourselves, came to be; and that gives us clues about, among other things, how our minds work and how we can improve the way we think about ourselves and thus handle ourselves in all sorts of situations.

Back to mental causation. Which kind of explanation gives us a better handle on what makes someone raise their arm? Not the physics or chemistry; it’s the story that is important. Even if we knew all the physical events involved in raising the arm, all the neural firings and muscle activations, something would be left out if we just left it at that.

Consider that in fact you hardly ever decide merely to raise your arm. You raise your arm to reach the jar on the top shelf. You raise your arm to wave goodbye to someone, or to wave hello. You raise your arm to illustrate a philosophical point about mental causation. But you don’t just decide to raise your arm in the absence of some context. And the context that makes sense of it all is the context of human motive. What we look for in an explanation of arm-raising is not the cause, but the reason.

Humans do things because they have reasons for doing them. By “reason” I mean a prediction, a goal and an action plan. The prediction is often implicit. You predict that the shelf won’t fall down, that the jar will contain what you think it does, and so forth. The goal is to get the jar down so you can use its contents, and the action plan is to reach for it. None of that requires you to think of the chemical composition of the jar or of the patterns of neural firings going on in your brain. Nor do those things explain your action. It is the story that counts.

So in sense the whole question is bogus. Mental events do not in fact cause physical events. Instead, mental events are the reasons for physical events. Causality as a category of explanation is inadequate and inappropriate.

Now certainly there is a connection. When a researcher stimulates certain areas of your brain you see colors or feel sensations, perhaps even raise your arm. And you can influence your own pulse rate and blood pressure by doing certain kinds of meditation. The mental is not separate from the physical. What causes us to be puzzled about it is our mistaken metaphysics.

I’ve written about this before. The mistake is to think that the fundamental categories of all that exists are disjoint, that mind is somehow separate from body. If we start there we have no end of puzzles, one of which is the problem of mental causation. A better view is Panpsychism, the view that everything, from the smallest quantum event to the most complex living being, has an aspect of mentality as well as physicality. If we start with Panpsychism we see that what makes the us do something is our motives, reasons, goals, desires, perceptions and beliefs. Then, since we are both mental and physical, the physical parts — the nerves, the brain cells, the motor muscles — activate so as to carry out our intentions. Can mental events cause physical events? No. But events that are both mental and physical can certainly cause events that are both physical and mental.

by Bill Meacham
Several factors determine the truthfulness of a theory or an explanation of events: congruence, consistency, coherence and usefulness.

• A true theory is congruent with our experience. It fits the facts. No fact is left unexplained. It is falsifiable, and nothing falsifying has been found. People think truth is correspondence to reality, understood as something independent of us. But we don’t have direct contact with reality, only with our experience of it. When what we experience is predictable then we can infer that our theory corresponds with reality. Our theory is congruent with the facts, as we experience them. When we discover new facts, we can change our theory. Truth is always provisional, not an end state.
• A true theory is internally consistent. It has no contradictions within itself, and it all fits together elegantly. Consistency allows us to infer things from what we already know. An inconsistent theory, one that contains contradictions, does not allow us to do this.
• A true theory is coherent with everything else we consider true. It confirms, or at least fails to contradict, the rest of our knowledge, where “knowledge” means beliefs for which we can give rigorous reasons. The physical sciences, for example, hold together quite well. Physics, chemistry, geology, biology and astronomy all reinforce each other.
• A true theory is useful. It has predictive power, allowing us to gain control of the world by making good choices concerning what is likely to happen, choices that pan out. It gives us mastery. When we act on the basis of a true theory or explanation, our actions are successful.

Truth enables us to exert our power, in the sense of our ability to get things done, successfully. We master both the world of physical things and the world of ideas, of theory. What is true is what works to organize our practice and our thought, so that we are able both to handle reality effectively and to reason with logical rigor to true conclusions.

Truth is useful. Does that mean that what is useful is true? That is not a useful question. Let’s not ask what truth is; let’s ask instead how we can recognize it reliably when it appears. If a theory is congruent with our experience, internally consistent, coherent with everything else we know, and useful for organizing our thinking and practice, then we can confidently consider it true.

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by Robert Tables
Truth is interpersonal. We tell each other things, and when they work out we call them truths. When they don’t, we call them errors or, if we are not charitable, lies. What we take as truth depends on what others around us espouse. For many centuries European Christians believed that men had one fewer rib than women because the Bible says that Eve was created from Adam’s rib. Nobody bothered to count because everyone assumed it was true. And when they finally counted, it was because everyone agreed on the count that the real truth became known. Even when we are alone, truth is interpersonal. We express these truths or errors or lies to others and to ourselves in language; and, as Wittgenstein pointed out, there can be no private language.

But the most essential truth, the truth by which we all live our lives, is intensely personal, private. We might call this “Truth,” with a capital T. Even though each of us lives our life by it, it can be different for each person. Shall I believe and obey the Torah, the New Testament, the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita, the Zend Avesta, the Dhammapada? Or none of the above: shall I find my own Truth in my own way? Am I more authentic if I do so? What if I find my Truth and it sets me apart from others? Am I then authentically lonely?

We need a community of seekers with a commitment to meta-Truth, recognizing that everyone’s personal Truth is to be respected, even though it might differ from someone else’s.

But even in such a community, some beliefs would be acceptable and others not. My belief that I am exceptional and deserve preferential treatment, perhaps because I alone have received a special revelation, is not likely to be shared by others. Whether that changes my mind or not depends on how compelling are my reasons for believing it and how deeply I feel the need for acceptance. From within the in-group we look with fear and revulsion on those who deny the accepted beliefs. From outside, we admire those who hold aloft the light of truth amidst the darkness of human ignorance.

And in every case it is we who judge, not I alone. Even the most personal Truth is adjudicated within a community and depends on the esteem of others.

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(1) Philosophy Now magazine, “What Is Truth?” Issue 86 Sept/Oct 2011, pp. 34-37. London: Anya Publications, 2011. Also online publication, URL = http://www.philosophynow.org/issue86/What_Is_Truth as of 22 November 2011.